***The
Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And
World War II-Frank Sinatra’s I’ll Never
Smile Again…
…funny,
he had to laugh, laugh to himself since if he had laughed out loud the seven
other guys in his tent, his makeshift tent which had served as his “home” for
the past few weeks of basic training down here in godforsaken Fort Dix, would
have raised holy hell (and worse) for disturbing their “beauty” sleep, about
what she had said that first night they met. Or really re-met since they had
been in class together senior year over at North Adamsville High School the
year before they graduated. They had met at a USO dance held in order to boost
morale for returning servicemen, those awaiting the troop ships out, and those
like him whose number been called le where she had volunteered as a hostess and
he had fronted on a few numbers for Lester Mann and the Band before he in turn
was to be inducted the next week. He had been the top singer at school, a
budding crooner in the Sinatra mold, and was attending music school when his
number came up. So naturally he had to do what was right, do what lots of guys
had already done.
He
had spied her, a known face among a crowd of strangers, went up and introduced
himself, they talked for a while and then out of nowhere mentioned that he had
wished that he had talked to her more in school. Wished he had had the courage
to talk to her since there was something about her that was appealing in a
fresh breeze way (he hadn’t put it that way but she knew what he meant, or at
least said she did. Just then Lester called him to the stage and he sang, sang
one song, I’ll Never Smile Again
aimed directly at her, with feeling. Later, as he walked her home she asked him
if it was true that he would not smile again if she was not his girl. He had
blurted out a quick uncompromising yes. They both laughed, laughed at how he
just blurted it out. And so they had a whirlwind week before he had to leave,
she had seen him off at the train station, and here he was thinking about her
while the other guys were snoring away. Yeah, he laughed to himself again, he
guessed that he really would never smile again if she was not his girl…
*******
Peter
Paul Markin comment on this series:
Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it
meant to our parents or not, or frankly, during that hellish growing up absurd
teenager time in the 1950s trying to figure out our places, if any, in the cold
war red scare world, if there was to be a world, and that was a close thing at
times, or whether we cared, music was as
dear a thing to them as to us, their sons and daughters, who were in the throes
of finding our own very different musical identities. As well, whether we knew
it or not, knew what sacred place the music of the late 1930s and 1940s, swing,
be-bop swing, be-bop flat-out, show tunes, you know jitter-bug stuff, and the
like held in their youthful hearts that was the music, their getting through
the tough times music, that went wafting through the house on the radio, on
record player, or for some the television, of many of those of us who
constitute the now graying fading generation of ‘68. And some of us will pass
to the beyond clueless as to what our forebears were attuned to when they came
of age in a world, a very darkly-etched world, which they too had not created,
and had no say in creating.
Yes they were crazy for the swing and sway of bespectacled Benny
Goodman blowing that clarinet like some angel- herald letting the world
know, if it did know already, that it
did not mean a thing, could not possibly matter in the universe, if you did not
swing, with and without Miss (Ms.) Peggy Lee, better with, better with, swaying
slightly lips moistened, swirling every guy in the place on Why Don’t You Do Right vowing he would
do just that for a smile and a chance at those slightly swaying hips. Mr. Harry
James with or without the orchestra , better with, blowing Gabriel’s horn,
knocking down walls, maybe Jericho, maybe just some Starlight Ballroom in
Kansas City blasting the joint with his You
Made Me Love You to the top of the charts. Elegant Duke Ellington with or
without Mr. Johnny Hodges blowing that sexy sax out into the ocean air night in
some Frisco club, blowing out to the Japan seas, on Taking The ‘A’ Train. Tommy Dorsey all banded up if there is such a
word making eyes misty with I’ll Never
Smile Again. Jimmy Dorsey too with
his own aggregation wailing Tangerine that
had every high school girl throwing dreamy nickels and dimes into the jukebox, with
or without fanfare, Glenn Miller, with or without those damn glasses, taking
that Sentimental Journey before his
too soon last journey. Miss (Ms.) Billie Holiday, Lady Day, with or without the
blues, personal blues, strung out blues too, singing everybody else’s blues
away with that throaty thing she had, that meaningful pause, yeah, Lady Sings The Blues. Miss Lena Horne
with or without stormy weather making grown men cry (women too) when she
reached that high note fretting about her long gone man, Jesus. Miss (Ms.) Margaret Whiting going for that Old Black Magic. Mr. Vaughn Monroe with
or without goalposts. Mr. Billy Eckstine, too. Mr. Frank Sinatra doing a
million songs fronting for the Dorseys and anybody who wanted to rise in that
swinging world, with or without a horde of bobbysoxers breaking down his doors,
putting everybody else to shame (and later too). The Inkspots, always with that
spoken refrain catch that nobody seemed to tire of, doing teary I’ll Get By or If I Didn’tCare. The Mills Brothers with or without those paper
dolls. The Andrews Sisters with or without rum in their Coca-Cola, The Dewdrops
with or without whatever they were doing with or without. Mr. Cole Porter, with
or without the boys, writing the bejesus out of
Tin Pan Alley and Broadway tunes. Mr. Irving Berlin with or without the
flag, ditto Mr. Porter. And Mr. George Gershwin with or without his brother,
creating Summertime and a thousand
other catchy tunes. Yeah, their survival music.
We the generation of ’68, baby-boomers, decidedly not what
Tom Brokaw dubbed rightly or wrongly “ the greatest generation,” decidedly not your parents’ or grandparents’ (please, please do not say
great-grandparents’ even if it is true) generation could not bear to hear that
music, could not bear to think anybody in the whole universe would think that
stuff was cool. Those of us who came of age, biological, political and social
age kicking, screaming and full of the post-war new age teenage angst and
alienation in the time of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot were ready for a jail-break, a
jail-break on all fronts and that included from “their song” stuff. Their staid
Eisenhower red scare cold war stuff (he their organizer of victory, their
gentile father Ike), hell, we knew that the world was scary, knew it every time
we were forced to go down into some dank school basement and squat down, heads
down too, hoping to high heaven that the Russkies had not decided to go crazy
and set off “the bomb,” many bombs. And every righteous teenager had a
nightmare that they were trapped in some fashionable family bunker and those
loving parents had thoughtfully brought their records down into the abyss to
soothe their savage beasts for the duration. Please, please, please if we must
die then at least let’s go out to Jerry Lee’s High School Confidential.
We were moreover, some of us any way and I like to think the
best of us, driven by some makeshift dream, ready to cross our own swords with
the night-takers of our time, and who, in the words of Camelot brother Bobby,
sweet ruthless Bobby of more than one shed tear, quoting from Alfred Lord
Tennyson, were “seeking a new world.” Those who took up the call to action heralded
by the new dispensation and slogged through that decade whether it was in the civil
rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle
to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came
down were kindred. To the disapproval, anger, and fury of more than one parent
who had gladly slept through the Eisenhower times. And that hammer came down
quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that we searched for,
desperately searched for, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone. But enough
about us this series is about our immediate forbears (but please, please not
great grandparents) their uphill struggles to make their vision of the their newer
world, their struggles to satisfy their
hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and the music that in their
youth they dreamed by on cold winter
nights and hot summer days.
This is emphatically the music, the get by the tough times
in the cities, on the farms, out in the wide spaces, of the hard born generation
that survived the dust bowl all farms blown away when the winds gathered like
some ancient locust curse to cleanse the earth and leave, leave nothing except
silt and coughs. All land worthless no crops could stand the beating, the bankers
fearful that the croppers would just leave taking whatever was left and the
dusted crowd heading west with whatever was movable. They drifted west, west as
far as California if the old buggy held up and they had enough gas in the tank,
not knowing what some old time professor, from Harvard I think, knew about the
frontier that it had been swallowed up, been staked out long ago and too bad.
Not knowing as well what some old time Okie balladeer knew that if you did not
have the dough California was just another Okie/Arkie bust.
Survived empty bowls, empty plates, wondering where the next
meal would come from, many times, too many times from some Sally soup-line,
some praise the lord before thy shall eat soup-line. Survived that serious
hunger want that deprives a man, a woman, of dignity scratching for roots like
some porcine beast in some back alley lot, too weak to go on but too weak to
stop as well. Survived, if not west, then no sugar bowl city street urchin corner
boy hard times of the 1930s Great Depression, always with that vagrant foot up
against some brick-laid wall, killing time, killing some dreams, sleeping under soot-lined railroad trestles,
on splintered park benches newspapers for a pillow’s rest (one eye open for
swarming festering jack-rollers and club-wielding sadistic cops), and hard
bench bus stations (ditto jack-rollers and cops). Survive the time of the madness just then
beating the tom-toms of war and degradation coming from a hungry want-infested Europe
filled with venom, those drums heralding the time of the night-takers casting a
shadow over the darkened world, portending the plainsong of the time of the
long knives, outlawing dreams for the duration.
Building up a pretty list of those wants on cold nights ,
name them, food, shelter, sex, two- bits in the pocket, name those hungers,
success, dignity, not having to struggle against the want night. Building that
phantom list while among tree-lined Hudson River “hobo jungle” riverside fires
stoked by fugitives, brethren, the fellahin of the world, upstream from the
clogged city, upstream from clogged city prying eyes and prickly cops, cities clogged
with broken dreams, or worse of late no dreams, and not enough food to go
around, not enough work either and that ate at him, her more that the food
hungers. Down in dusty arroyos, parched, no water, no agua aqui senor, lo
siento, as they, the bracero brethren, passed the water jug between them and
pointed him west, west you cannot stay here gringo, no way. Under forsaken silver-plated
bridges, steel beams to rest a weary head, rolled blanket for his pillow,
trying to keep the winds at bay. Survived
god knows how by taking the nearest freight west, some smoke and dreams
freight, sleeping on some straw-scratched floor, plugging ears with napkins to
drown out the rattling rails and deep sleep snores. Taking Southern Pacific,
Union Pacific, B&O, Illinois Central, Penn Central, Empire State, Boston
and Maine, or one of a million trunk lines to go out, and young as he was,
desperate as he was, penniless as he was, search for, well, search for…
Searching for something that was not triple- decker bodies,
three to a room sharing some scraggly blanket, an old worn out pillow for rest,
the faint smell of oatmeal, twenty days in a row oatmeal, oatmeal with.., being
cooked in the next room meaning no Pa work, meaning one jump, maybe not even
that, ahead of the sullen dreaded bastard rent- collector (the landlords do not
dare come in person so they hire the task out), meaning the sheriff, his damn
auction, and the streets are closing in. (What did the Sheriff care that all
meager life-times possessions were street-ward bound he was paid by the item
tossed.) Bodies, brothers and sisters, enough to lose count, piled high,
cold-water flat high, that damn cold water splash signifying how low things
have gotten, not even hot water for the weekly bath, with a common commode for
the whole floor and brown-stained sink.
Later moving down the scale, down to the lower depths as
some Russian writer called them in a book of that name, a rooming house room
for the same number of bodies, smudged prison-paned window looking out onto the
air- shaft, dark, dark with despair, no air but some fetid foul breeze from the
basement furnace, the very, very faint odor of oatmeal, thinned out even
further, who knows how many days in a row, from Ma’s make-shift hot plate on
its last legs. Hell, call it what it was
a flop house stinking of perspiration and low-shelf whiskeys and wines. Stinking
of winos and riffraff in the hallways howling at the moon all night and
jack-rollers preying on whoever was witless enough to walk into his lair. All
around shadows, moonlight shadows, moonless night shadows the times when the
midnight sifters plied their trade and snuck in, snuck in these damn one room
hells looking for anything, anything to pawn, anything to feed that junk habit
that had them in its grip. Ma, yelling at the kids, jesus, at the kids, milling
around the room, that why didn’t they, the jack-rollers, the midnight sifters,
the junkies, and the twisted sister street tricks (whores she called them when
the kids got older and knew what that word meant) go uptown and bother the
Mayfair swells who had dough and leave respectable people alone.
Others had it worse, tumbled down shack, window pane-less
some wax paper taped to hold off the winds and rains coming from the north,
tarpaper siding leaving exposed wood to rot and provide homes for fugitive
termites and vermin, roof tiles falling leaving poorly patched spots where the
spring rains would wash through, wash through to the six buckets which were
placed beneath the patches to hold off collapse, a lean-to ready to fall to the
first wind, the first red wind, an ill wind, a land wind the old sailors, old
tars called it and maybe they were right, coming out of the mountains and
swooping down the hills and hollows, ready to fall to the first downpour rain,
washed away. Cold water flat, flop house room, tumbled-down shack, leave them
behind, get out on the open road, blow the stinks off, get that bindle stick
together, a cup, a plate, spoon, a comb just in case you are in a town, some
matches, keep dry matches, a pouch of Bull Durham and papers, maybe some change
all wrapped in a handkerchief, the worldly possessions of the fellahin, the
fugitive, the hobo, the tramp and the bum, grab that slow moving freight before
she picks up steam, watch out for the “bulls” and search for the great promised
American night that had been tattered by world events, and greed.
Survived the Hoovervilles, the world come down to the great
cardboard siding, tin can cartons, discarded boxes, found in some orphan
street, dilapidated, to serve as buffer against the hard winter winds, the
spring rains and that damn relentless summer heat. Tin can roof thundering
sounds at every light rain, slap-dash jerry-built camp explosions along rivers.
Mighty rivers like the Missouri and Mississippi and no account ones, trickle down
ones, like the Elko and the Dearborn that no longer gushed ramparts. Survived down
in hard rock- infested ravines filled with brambles, snakes, gnarly insects
ready to do battle once some fugitive arm or leg was exposed. Survived under
railroad trestles, the clanking freight trains above, what did Shakespeare call
it, yes, murdering sleep, and murdering dreams too. No wonder some guy, some
hobo philosopher-king, and don’t laugh there were such fellows, along with
broken-down stockbrokers, wreaked high financiers, ex-movie moguls, unemployed
cabbies, unemployable union organizers, out-of-work workers of all types,
families attached, and habitual malingerers trying to weather another day
without working, said that life, his life anyway, and maybe their lives, were
nothing but train smoke and wishful thinking. Hell, he didn’t know the half of
it, didn’t know that life could get much coarser out on the great Wilderness
Road.
Tossed, hither and yon, cold- water flats, flop-houses,
tarpaper shacks, then the great outdoors, what did that guy call it, that
writer guy, I forget his name, called it probably from his cozy fireplaced
study, fully nourished from the look of his pipe-smoking face on the back
jacket of his latest pot-boiler, oh yeah, the romance of the road. Tossed
around about six million different ways, name each one instead of counting
sheep at night, murdered sleep. But it all came down to this, to the rivers,
ravines, trestled-bridges, when the banks, yeah, the banks, the usual suspects,
and rightly so from all the evidence, robbed people of their shacks, their
cottages, their farm houses, their smokeless back forty dreams, and left them
with nothing but the romance of the road. Even that smug pipe-filled writer,
Jesus, what was his name, should pause to wonder. Yah, those bastards robbed
them, picked them clean, as an old-time balladeer, a free-wheeling,
song-writing red, a commie, hell, nothing but a Russkie-loving home-grown
Bolshevik in the days when in some quarters, say, Frisco town, Akron,
Minneapolis, blessed shut-down Flint, lion Detroit, hog-butcher to the world
Chi town, smelter to the world Pittsburgh, sailing under that banner was a
badge of honor, or just another fist in the struggle, welcome brother, welcome
sister, we need all the hands, no, all the clenched fists we can get, said at
the time not with a gun but with a fountain pen, but still robbed them. Cleaned
them out, to get lost on that Wilderness Road, that trail of one thousand tears
leading west.
Survived the soup kitchens hungers, the gnawing can’t wait
in the endless waiting line for scraps, dreaming of some by-gone steak or dish
of ice cream, and always that hunger, not the stomach hunger although that was
ever present, but the hunger that hurts a man, hurts his pride, hurts a woman’s
too, hurts when he, they have to stick their hands out, stick them out and not
know why. Not know why a year before the sun was shining, they had dreams of
living in that little house, a cottage really, ending their patterned days there,
and now had shutter dreams of living in that cold-water flat, the flop-house
room, the tar-paper shack forever turning their mouths to ashes. Not knowing
why Bill up the street, Jack down the road, Leroy across the way was working,
worrying but working, while his two hands were idle, and a million human things
still needed to be fixed, to be built, to be created. And she cried a tear on
those hands to see how his ignorance of what made the world go round ate at
him, ate at his beautiful heart.
Planning the fruitless day, fruitless since he was born to
work, took pride in work, had worked since twelve to help a struggling family
even in good times, planning around dark
hour Sally breakfasts don’t be late, six to nine, but with sermon and song attached,
mission stuff in heat-soaked rooms, men smelling of unwashed men, and drink
(quick drink, an eye-opener they called it in the shelter, before entry and hence a strong smell of
cheap rotgut). Planning around city hall hand-out lunches eaten on park benches
or lawns, peanut butter sandwiches, slapped slap-dash together with a pint box
of milk and an apple, maybe. Worse, worse by far the nightly Saint Vincent
DePaul suppers, soup, bread, some canned vegetable, something they called meat
but was in dispute, lukewarm coffee. Such a feast had only, only if you could
prove you were truly destitute with a letter from some churchman, a Catholic
churchman, like Protestants, Jews, Seventh-Day Adventist, Quakers, Shakers,
Devil-worshippers, Jainists, Buddhists, Moslems, and every other kind of
fellahin religionists were not hungry just then, and, in addition to the
religious test, under some terrible penalty, you had to say that you had
searched for work that day. A hard dollar, hard dollar indeed.
Jesus, out of work for another day, another in a long line
of days, long line of Sally, City Hall, Saint Vincent DePaul hand-out days, with
three hungry growing kids to feed, boys, wouldn’t you know it, kids, boys, who, what did they call what
kids did then, oh yeah, eat them out of house and home. A wife, a precious
wife, sickly, sickly from boys too close together, sickly from her own delicate
frame, sick unto death of the not having,
not having for the boys, their boys, he thought. Making, she making, sick or
not, their meager savings, their dole hand -out, their occasional relative
money gift, stretch beyond endurance with the weekly bill envelopes always
shorting some irate collector. Damn, little work waiting for anybody that day,
that day when all hell broke loose and the economy tanked again, stocks
tumbled, again, and guys were jumping out high buildings left and right, guys
were trying to scrape every dime they could gather in order to not go under and
face the high building windows, guys were getting tossed out of work, other
guys who were thinking about buying guns and taking what they could take, and
take it fast at least that is what it said in the Boston Globe he found on the ground and read while he waited once
again in the damn soup line (ditto the reportage in The New York Times, Washington
Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner if anybody
was asking). They, the newspapers, said that there was too much around, too
many cars, houses, too much wheat, cotton, oil, too many record-players,
whatever, Jesus, too much, too many, and he with nothing for those kids, those
eat them out of house and home boys, nothing and he was too proud just then to
ask for some damn letter to give to those Vincent DePaul hard-hearts.
And that day not him, not him yet, not him with a sickly
wife worrying unto death over bill envelopes, not him with three hungry boys
conceived too closely together, not him who was without steady work and glad
get what he got when he got it and could shake off the damn charity soup-lines
for a time, could thumb his nose at those Vincent DePaul hard-hearts, but
others. Others who read more that the Boston
Globe (and the dittos) and who were
dreaming of that full head of steam day to come, the day to even things up a
little for a mess that they had not made, in places like big auto Flint eyeing
those lines and thinking how to shut them down from the inside, out in waterfront
Frisco town thinking that in order to make the water bosses cry that they might
have to shut the whole place down, out in rubber Akron thinking of maybe even
bringing the unemployed, guys like him to stop the scabbing, guys,
steel-sweated guys out in hog butcher to the world prairie Chicago thinking of
onebig union, hell, even in boondock small trucker Minneapolis thinking of
bringing in the wives, sisters, and sweethearts, the whole sweated, misbegotten
fellahin world for one big push,
Yeah, they dreamed a lot, in places like bayside Frisco
town, mid-America Akron, trucker
Minneapolis, Chi town name your industry, clanky Flint and motor city Detroit,
places like Harlan, Birmingham, Los Angeles too, seemed like half the whole
fellahin was dreaming then, and some
guys and gals, some stand-up guys and gals were scheming too, talking it up, were
not going quietly into the rubbish can of history, dreaming of that day when
the score would get evened, evened a little, and a man (and where I say man I
say woman too, women who like they used to say in China hold up half the sky),
could hold his head up a little, could at least bring bread, maybe some fruits
and vegetables, to those three hungry growing kids, those boys who were eating
him out of house and home, who didn’t understand the finer point of world
economics, just hunger. Stomach hunger not that hunger that gnawed at him,
there would be time enough for that for them. Until then, until he decides to
not go quietly into the rubbish can of history though, he is left shifting the
scroungings of the trash piles of the urban glut, the discard of the haves, the
have- nots throw nothing away. On other horizons, Omaha, Grand Junction,
Topeka, Davenport, Neola, Muskogee,
places where the corn and wheat grow tall, taller than a man, the
brethren curse the rural fallow fields, curse the jack-robber banks, and curse
the weather, but curse most of all having to pack up and head, head anywhere,
but the here, and search, search like that brother on that urban glut pile for
a way to curb that gnawing hungry that cried out in the night-want, want
that is all.
Survived too the look, the look of those, the what did FDR
(Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the young, or forgetful) call them, oh yeah, the
economic royalists, today’s 1%, the rack-renters, the coupon-clippers, the
guys, as one of their number from an earlier generation, the openly cutthroat
robber barons of unblessed memory, said, who hired one half of the working
class to fight the other. Survived the look, if they could have seen that
controlled furious look like the maids and manservants who attended to their
toilet saw it, especially after a hard night at the club, or soiree. Saw the
look of those who in their fortified towers, their Xanadus, their Dearborns, their
Lake Shore Drives, their Beacon Hills, their Upper East Sides, their Nob Hills,
and a few other spots, tittered that not everybody was built to survive to be
the fittest. That crowd, and let’s name names, a few anyway, Ford, General
Motors, Firestone, U.S. Steel, the Vanderbilts, The Spragues, the Alexanders,
the Morgans, The Goldmans, the Harrimans and their agents (always agents,
always a nest full of agents, always a layer to shield them from life’s blows) fought
tooth and nail against the little guy trying to break bread. Fought that
brother, that little guy, that guy we know was scrounging the refuge piles, out
there pounding the mean streets too proud to ask for a letter, Jesus, a letter
for some leftover food, before he got “religion” about what was what in the
land of “milk and honey.”
A land where they, the swells, hah, the Mayfair swells of
the novels, wreaked havoc on that farmer out in the dust bowl now travelling
some road, some road west knowing that the East was barred up, egging him on to
some hot dusty bracero labor field picking, maybe “hire” him on as a scab
against those uppity city boys. Yes, they fought every guy trying to get out from under that
cardboard, tar paper, windowless soup kitchen world along with a hell of a lot
of comrades, yes, comrades, not Russkie comrades although reds were thick in
those battles, took their lumps in Frisco, Flint, Akron and Minneapolis, hell,
any place where a righteous people were rising, kindred in the struggle to put
that survival of the fittest noise on the back-burner of human history. To
stand up and take collective action to
put things right, hell, made the bosses cry bloody murder when they shut down
their factories, shut them down cold until some puny penny justice was eked
out. Just so they could lift their fellahin heads a little out of the mire of
human existence. And maybe just maybe make that poor unknowingly mean-street
walking city brother, the one with the three growing boys eating him out of
house and home, scrounging on the urban refuge piles, fretting away his time
worrying about the next meal, the next roof, thinking maybe he should take that
scab job being offered although every instinct said no, and that sweated farm
boy with a parcel of kids heading forlornly west ready to grab even bracero
work to keep the wolves at bay although his every instinct said no as well,
think twice about helping those Mayfair swells.
Survived but took time out too, time out if young perhaps,
as if such things were embedded in some secret teen coda, to stretch those
legs, to flash those legs, to sway those hips, to flash the new moves not, I
repeat, not the ones learned at sixth grade Miss Prissy’s Saturday dance
classes but the ones that every mother, every girl mother warned her Susie
against, to a new sound coming out of the mist, coming to take the sting out of
the want years nights, and the brewing night of the long knives. Coming out of
New York, always New York then, Minton’s, Jimmy’s, some other uptown clubs, Chicago, Chicago of the big horns and that
stream, that black stream heading north, following the northern star, again,
for jobs and to get the hell away from one Mister James Crow, from Detroit,
with blessed Detroit Slim and automobile sounds, and Kansas City, the Missouri
K.C. okay, the Bird land hatchery, the Prez’s big sexy sax blow home. Jesus no
wonder that madman Hitler banned it, along with dreams.
The sound of blessed swing, all big horns, big reeds, big,
well big band, replacing the dour Brother,
Can You Spare a Dime and its brethren ,
no banishing such thoughts, casting them out with soup lines (and that
awful Friday Saint Vincent DePaul fish stew that even Jesus would have turned
down in favor of bread, wine and a listen to Benny’s Buddha Swings) casting that kind of hunger out for a moment, a
magical realistic moment, casting out ill-fitting, out of fashion, threadbare
(nice, huh) second-hand clothes (passed down from out- the- door hobo brothers and sisters tramping this good
green earth looking for their place, or at least a job of work and money in
their newer threadbare [still nice] clothes), and casting aside from hunger
looks, that gaunt look of those who have their wanting habits on and no way to
do a thing about it. Banished, all such
things banished because after all it did not mean a thing, could not possibly
place you anywhere else but in squareville (my term, not theirs), if you did
not have that swing. To be as one with jitter-buggery if there was (is) such a
word (together, not buggery by itself, not in those days, not in the public
vocabulary anyway). And swing as it lost steam with all the boys, all the swing
boys, all oversea and the home fire girls tired of dancing two girl dancing, a
fade echo of the cool age be-bop that was a-borning, making everybody reach for
that high white note floating out of Minton’s, Big Bill’s Jimmie’s, hell, even
Olde Saco’s Starlight Ballroom before it breezed out in the ocean air night,
crashed into the tepid sea. Yeah.
Survived, as if there was no time to breathe in new fresh
airs, new be-bop tunes, new dance moves, to slog through the time of the gun in
World War II. A time when the
night-takers, those who craved the revenge night of the long knives took giant
steps in Europe and Asia trying to make that same little guy, Brit, Frenchie,
Chinaman, Filipino, God’s American, and half the races and nationalities on
this good green earth cry uncle and buckle under, take it, take their stuff
without a squawk. It took a bit, took a little shock, to get those war juices
flowing, to forget about the blood-letting that had gone on before when the
flower of Europe, when the older brothers and fathers the generation before,
had taken their number when they were called.
And so after Pearl, after that other shoe dropped on a candid world
Johnnie, Jimmie, Paulie, Benny too, all the guys from the old neighborhood, the
corner boys, the guys who hung around Doc’s hands in their pockets, guys trying
to rub nickels together to play some jitter-buggery thing, guys who had it
tough growing up hard in those bad Depression days, took their numbers and fell
in line.
Guys too from the wheat fields, Kansas Iowa, you know places
where they grow wheat, guys fresh from some Saturday night dance, some country square
thing, all shy and with calloused hands, eyeing, eyeing to perdition some
virginal Betty or Sue, guys from the coal slags, deep down in hill country,
down in the hollows away from public notice, some rumble down shack to rest
their heads, full of backwoods home liquor, blackened fingernails, never ever
fully clean once the coal got on them, Saturday night front porch fiddlings
wound up carrying a M-1 on the shoulder in Europe or the Pacific. Leaving all
those Susies, Lauras, Betties, and dark-haired Rebeccas too waiting at home
hoping to high heaven that some wayward gun had not carried off sweetheart
Johnnie, Jimmy, Paulie, or young Benny.
Jesus not young Benny. Not the runt of the corner boy litter, not our Benny.
Not carried off that sweet farm fresh boy with the sly grin, not carried off
that coal-dust young man with those jet-black eyes, and fingers.
Survived the endless lines of boys heading off East and
West, heading off to right some wrongs, at least that is what the guys in
charge said, put a big dent in the style of the night-takers, the guys who
wanted to cut up the world into two to three pieces, and that was that, cutting
the little guy, making the little guys like it, making them take it or else.
Some of those little guys, after Pearl for sure, could hardly wait to get to
the recruiting office, hardly wait to go mano y mano with the night-takers and
their illicit dreams, went gladly from the farms, the factories and the mines,
many to never look back, never to farm, to run a production line, or to dig
from the earth but make new lives, or lay down their heads in some god forsaken
piece of dirt, or some watery abyss. Others, well, others were hanging back
waiting to be drafted by their friends and neighbors at the local draft board,
hanging back just a little to think things over, to see if maybe they could be
better used on the home front, scared okay (as if the quick-step volunteers
were not afraid, or should have been) but who gave a good accounting of
themselves when their number came up. Still others head over heels they were
exempt, 4-F, bad feet, you see. Somebody had to keep the home fires, keeping
the womenfolk happy.
All, all except that last crew, the dodgers found in every
war, who got to sit a home with Susie,
Laura, Betty and even odd-ball Rebecca were constantly waiting for the other
shoe to drop, for their ships to sail or their planes to fly. Hanging in some
old time corner boy drugstore, Doc’s, Rexall, name your drugstore name, just
like when they were kids (a mere few weeks before), talking the talk like they
used to do to kill time, maybe sitting two by two (two uniforms, two girls if
anybody was asking) at the soda fountain playing that newly installed jukebox
until the nickels ran out. Listened to funny banana boat songs, rum and coca
cola songs, siting under the apple tree songs, songs to forget about the work
abroad, and just some flat-out jitter-bugging stuff, frothy stuff in order to
get a minute’s reprieve from thoughts of the journey ahead.
Listened too to dreamy, sentimental songs, Always, I Don’t
Want To Set The World On Fire, Sentimental Journey, songs that spoke of true
love, their true love that would out last the ages, would carrying them through
that life together if they could ever keep those damn night-takers at bay, songs
about faraway places, We’ll Meet Again, Til Then, songs that spoke of future
sorrows, future partings, future returnings (always implying though that maybe
there would be no return), future sacrifices, future morale-builders, songs about
keeping lamp- lights burning, songs to give meeting to that personal sacrifice,
to keep the womenfolk, to keep her from fretting her life away waiting for that
dreaded other drop, songs about making a better world out of the fire and
brimstone sacrifice before them.
Songs to make the best out of the situation about Johnnie,
Jimmie and the gang actually returning, returning whole, and putting a big dent
in their dreams, that small white house with the white picket fence (maybe
needing a little painting, maybe they could do that together), kids, maybe a
new car once in a while you know the stuff that keeps average joes alive in
sullen foxholes, sea-sick troop transports, freezing cargo planes, keeps them
good and alive. Hell, songs, White Cliffs
Of Dover songs, about maybe the damn wars would be over sooner rather than
later. Listened, drawing closer, getting all, uh, moony-eyed, and as old Doc,
or some woe-begotten soda jerk, some high school kid, wet behind the ears, with
that white paper service cap at some obscure angle and now smudged white jacket
implying that he was in the service too, told them to leave he was closing up
they held out for one last tune. Then, well-fortified with swoony feelings they
made for the beach, if near a beach, the pond, if near a pond, the back forty, if
near the back forty, the hills, you know, or whatever passed for a lovers’ lane
in their locale and with the echo of those songs as background, well, do I have
draw you a map, what do you think they did, why do you think they call us
baby-boomers.
The music, this survival music, Harry James, Benny, the
Dorsey boys, Bing, Frank, the Mills Brothers, the Inkspots, and on and on wafted
(nice word, huh) through the air coming from a large console radio, the prized
possession centered in the small square living room of my growing up house amid
the squalor of falling roof tiles, a broken window or two patched up with
cardboard and tape, a front door that would not shut, rooms with second-hand
sofas, mattresses, chairs, desks, tables, mildewy towels, corroded sinks,
barely serviceable bathtubs, and woe-begotten
stuffed pillows smelling of mothballs. My broken down, needs a new roof, random
shingles on the ground as proof, cracked windows stuffed with paper and held
with masking tape in need of panes, no proof needed, overgrown lawn in need of
cutting of a shack (there is literally no other way to describe it, then or in
its current condition) of a too small, much too small for four growing boys and
two parents, house. The no room to breathe, no space but shared space, the from
hunger look of all the denizens, the stink of my father’s war wounds that would
not heal, the stink of too many people in too small a house, excuse me shack.
The noise, damn the noise from the nearby railroad, putting paid to wrong side
of the tracks-dom worst of all. Jesus.
That wrong side of the tracks shack of a house surrounded by
other houses, shack houses, too small to fit big Irish Catholic- sized families
with stony-eyed dreams. Small dreams of Johnny or Jimmy getting on the force
(cops, okay), and Lorrie and Pamela getting those secure City Hall jobs in the
steno pool until some bright prospect came by and threw a ring at them but in
the meantime shack life, and small faded dreams. Funny, no, ironic but these
tumbled-down shacks which seemingly would fall with a first serious wind represented
in some frankly weird form (but what knew I of such unnamed weirdness then I
just cried out in some fit of angst, cried out against that railroad noise, and
that sour smell of sweat) the great good desire of those warriors, and almost
to a man they had served, and their war brides who had waited, had fretted
while waiting, to latch onto a piece of golden age America.
And take their struggle survival music from Doc’s jukebox,
from the Starlight Ballroom, from WDJA, with them as if to validate their sweet
memory dreams, their youthful innocence before the guys got caught up, caught
up close and personal, the ugliness of war, the things they would not speak of
unto the grave, and the gals not asking, not asking for all the money in the
world but sensing that he, they, had changed, had lost some youthful thing. That
radio, that priceless radio console taking pride of place, as if a lifesaver,
literally, tuned to local station WDJA in North Adamsville, the memory station
for those World War II warriors and their war brides, those who made it back.
Some wizard radio station manager knowing his, probably his in those days,
demographics, spinned those 1940s platters exclusively, as well as aimed the
ubiquitous advertisement at that crowd. Cars, sofas, beds, shaving gear, soap,
department store sales, all the basics for the growing families spawned (nice,
huh) by those warriors and brides.
My harried mother, harried like all the neighborhood large
brood mothers, harried by the bleak wanting prospects of the day with four
growing boys and not enough, nor enough food, not enough, well, just not enough
and leave it at that. Maybe bewildered is a better expression for her plight,
for her wartime young marriage adventure not wanting to be left with only a
memory of my father if things went wrong in the Pacific. As so she took to turning
the radio on to start her day, hoping that Paper
Dolls, I’ll Get By, or dreamy Tangerine
would chase her immediate sorrows away. Yea, a quick boost of their songs
was called for, their spring youth meeting at some USO dance songs before he
shipped out. Those songs embedded deep in memory, wistful young memory,
or so it seemed as she hummed away the day, used the music as background on her
appointed household rounds. And whether she won or lost the day’s bout with not
enough, with some ill-winded message from some bill due, seemingly always some
four boy hurt, some bad father work news, the list of her daily sorrows and
trepidations could have stretched to infinity she perked up, swayed even to
those tunes.
That stuff, that mother dream stuff, that piano/drum-driven
stuff with some torch-singer, Peggy Lee, Helen Morgan, Margaret Whiting, maybe
even a sneak Billie thrown in bleeding all over the floor drove me crazy
then Some she bleeding with the pain
of her thwarted loves, her man hurts,
her wanderings in search of something in this funny old world, her waitings,
waiting for the good times, waiting in line for the rations, waiting, waiting
alone mind you, for her man to come home, come home whole from some place whose
name she could not pronounce, they should have called it the waiting generation,
just flat-out drove me crazy then. Mush stuff at a time when I was craving the
big break-out rock and roll sounds I kept hearing every time I went and played
the jukebox at Doc’s Drugstore over on Walker Street down near the beach (not
the old torn down Doc’s of their generation over on Billings Road if that is
what you are thinking). As far as I know Doc (the son of their Doc), knowing
his demographics as well as that radio executive at WDJA, did not, I repeat,
did not, stock that stuff that, uh, mush for his rock-crazed after school soda
fountain crowd, probably stocked nothing, mercifully before about 1955. Funny
thing though while I am still a child of rock and roll this so-called mushy
stuff sounds pretty good to these ears now long after my parents and those who
performed this music have passed on. Go figure.
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